Review Summary

“Live every day as if it were your last” is a piece of corny wisdom I never quite understood until Abel Ferrara’s new film explored an obvious corollary: Your last day — or, as it happens, the whole planet’s last day — will be just like every other one. Mr. Ferrara makes this point with ingenuity and characteristic thrift by using found news footage to provide images of apocalypse. Crowds gather in St. Peter’s Square; candlelight processions wind through the streets of unidentified cities. These evocations of global disaster are part of the background: atmospheric touches in an eccentric and moving portrait of souls in extremis. “4:44 Last Day on Earth,” Mr. Ferrara’s 20th feature, is not another colossal, special-effects-laden end-times Hollywood spectacle. Instead, like Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia,” it offers an intimately scaled view of the destruction of the world, with an emphasis on how it all feels to a Bohemian couple living on Mr. Ferrara’s beloved Lower East Side of Manhattan.
— A. O. Scott